Japan storage pools big worry -U.S. nuclear expert

WASHINGTON, March 18 - Dangerous radiation has
the potential of spewing uncontrollably from open-air pools
storing spent nuclear fuel at Japan's crippled Fukushima power
plant, according to a U.S. expert.

About one-third of U.S. nuclear facilities are designed in
the same way, said Robert Alvarez, a senior U.S. Department of
Energy official during the Clinton administration.

"If you look at the photos" of the Fukushima Daiichi
facility in northeastern Japan, "you see at least two pools are
exposed to the open sky," Alvarez said.

One of the immediate problems facing Japan is the cooling
water in the pools may already have drained partially or
completely. When spent fuel rods are exposed to the air they
can easily catch fire, raising a deadly mix of radiation into
the atmosphere.

The back-to-back disasters severely damaged the Fukushima
Daiichi plant and so far, attempts to secure the facility have
failed.

The spent fuel was moved from the plant's reactors to
storage pools only a year ago, "which means relative to its
radioactive decay it's still what we call fresh fuel and gives
off quite a bit of heat as it decays," said Alvarez, now a
senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies.

He spoke to reporters at a news conference sponsored by the
institute, Friends of the Earth and Physicians for Social
Responsibility, which have advocated for more use of
sustainable energy sources, such as wind, solar and
hydroelectric power.

Alvarez said the storage pools, elevated several stories
above ground and not in a containment dome like the nuclear
reactors themselves, have the potential of putting "significant
amounts of cesium 137," a byproduct of nuclear fission, into
the open air.

Cancer-causing Cesium 137, he added, "is the really bad
actor in this" with its ability to emit penetrating radiation
over long periods.

Of 104 nuclear reactors in the United States, Alvarez said,
34 are of the same design -- open-air, elevated storage pools
-- as the Fukushima plant.

MORE SPENT FUEL IN U.S. POOLS

But the U.S. pools are storing much more spent fuel than
the ones in Fukushima and "are currently holding, on the
average, four times more than their design intended," he said.

That's because the United States has been unable to settle
on long-term sites for storing waste from nuclear power
plants.

Nearly a decade ago, Alvarez said, he began warning the
United States about the need to pay more attention to risks at
the open-air storage pools.

Peter Bradford, a former commissioner at the Nuclear
Regulatory Commission, said questions have been raised for
years about whether spent fuel is being safely stored at U.S.
power plants.

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission pretty bluntly shunted
those questions aside," Bradford told Reuters Insider TV.
Bradford said the commission even tried to prevent the
publication of a study of the issue completed by the National
Academy of Sciences.

"That kind of complacency, the sense that everything is
good enough already, is very unlikely to persist in the wake of
these events" in Japan, said Bradford, who is now an adjunct
professor at the Vermont Law School.

He served on the NRC during the 1979 partial core meltdown
at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania.
"In terms of severity, this accident (in Japan) left Three Mile
Island in the rear-view mirror several days ago," Bradford said
at the news conference with Alvarez.

Bradford speculated that the disaster in Japan will make
efforts to expand nuclear energy in the United States "dead for
now."